AJ Arberry’s British Orientalists (1943) was published as part of the very collectible Britain in Pictures series, a series of 126 books published between 1941 and 1945 as an important component of Britain‘s wartime propaganda to try and show their was a British civilization (and in this case very much an empire!) worth fighting to defend. The book focuses on South Asia but does include some discussion of China and Macao. It was written by Arthur John Arberry (1905-1969), an Arabic scholar who had worked at Cairo University before the war. During the Second World War he was a Postal Censor in Liverpool before being moved to the Ministry of Information where, among his task presumably, was writing British Orientalists. He later held the Chair of Persian Studies at SOAS in London.
My interview with James Birch, author of Gilbert & George and the Communists (Cheerio Publishing) & how he managed to arrange their incredible 1993 exhibitions in Beijing & Shanghai – for the China-Britain Business Council magazine Focus… Click here to read…
Thomas Bird will introduce his latest publication Harmony Express: Travels by Train through China, a travelogue that recounts the years he spent railway-wayfaring in China, from 2014 until late-2019, when the country was in the midst of a railway building boom, plying the world’s longest high-speed network.
SOAS, London – 18/2/25 – 5pm – Free but register here
Thomas Bird found himself in southern China free from any serious commitments. His rock band had just split up, he’d left his job as the Shenzhen editor of a lifestyle magazine and his girlfriend disappeared from his life. Seeking the tonic of travel, Bird hit the railroad with a plan… to explore The People’s Republic of China by train. The country was in the midst of a railway building boom the likes of which the world has never seen, and Bird was poised to make China Railways his muse. One year morphed into several as Bird whizzed from high-tech Shenzhen to colonial Xiamen at high-speed; “flew” into Shanghai aboard a Maglev; chugged through rural Sichuan Province aboard an old steam locomotive. Putting the people he meets front and center, Bird delivers a portrait of an era, as he grapples to comprehend an inscrutable land undergoing breakneck change.
Expertly weaving Chinese history into his travelogue, Bird makes the story of China’s long journey to modernity analogues with the development of the national railway network. He investigates the impact of “railway imperialism” a century ago when China’s railways lagged sorely behind the rest of the world and considers Beijing’s obsession with “catching-up” as represented by its stealthy new fleet of Harmony trains plying the world’s longest high-speed network. Through his travels, Bird comes to view Chinese trains as “time-machines” bridging the impoverished countryside, tumbledown third-tier towns and gilded megacities.
Wallis arrived in Peking in December 1924 on the Peking-Tientsin train that ran along the Tartar Wall to the railway station at Chienmen(Qianmen)…what a way to arrive!
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
Photo albums remained popular purchases – while the others in this series have been late 19th and early 20th century this album is from the late 1950s and purchased in Hong Kong…(see here and here and here). And another purchased in Japan c.first half 20th century…..
Wallis Simpson by Cecil Beaton for Vogue – Chinese style came to define her “look” – note her chignon hairstyle with twist and Chinoiserie collar adornment…
Interestingly Beaton must have had that wire, string or whatever it is hanging around in his studio as it seems to feature in his portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas…
Visited the Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines exhibition at the gallery at Charleston at Firle in East Sussex (the old home of Vanessa and Julian Bell). It’s on till February 25 2025. The two artists founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in 1937, first in Dedham and then at Benton End, Suffolk. Morris (1889-1982) was also a keen portrait painter (as well as his better known flower paintings) and the exhibition features a range of his portrait work. Lett-Haines was more of a surrealist.
Among the various Morris painted portraits is one dated as 1922 (which may or may not be correct) and said to be of “Ivy Ichaloy”. It is a portrait of a Chinese woman in a cheongsam-style dress from the upper body up. It is noted that the portrait is on loan to Charleston fromGainsborough’sHouse, the birthplace of the English painter Thomas Gainsborough and now a museum and gallery in Sudbury, Suffolk.
However, the name “Ichaloy” is misleading and this appears to be a woman actually called Ivy Achoy. Wherw “Ichaloy” comes from I do not know.
Which leads us to who was Ivy Achoy? Well, she was a Trinidadian Chinese, born and raised in Port of Spain before coming to London. Her full name was Ivy Achlan Achoy. In Trinidad she was an artist and art critic involved (and perhaps an original founder) of the influential Port of Spain-based “Society of Trinidad Independents”. The group also included Amy Leong Pang (like Ivy a Trinidadian-Chinese, who had studied painting in China), Hugh Stollmeyer (an Englishman from a colonial family who studied art in New York), Alice Pashley (an Englishwoman who painted batiks), and Alfred Menzies (an artist I believe).
The Society was a modernist grouping, looking to “shock the bourgeoise”, discussing racism, sexism, capitalism and homophobia. In 1931 one member, Albert Gomes, founded their journal The Beacon which also involved the (now very well known) writer and historian CLR James. The group disbanded in 1938 after being accused by the colonial government of being “Bohemian” for trying to exhibit a series of Russian-painted nudes. Now scholars generally see the Society as intellectually important in Trinidad and Tobago.
I’m afraid I don’t know any more about Ivy – why she was in London, or how the portrait came to painted by Morris? So any additional information most welcome?
